[design] Dept of "You Had ONE Job, Designer!" Dept.

3000.

Yes, friends, this is post number three thousand. Celebrate, yay, streamers, party favors, okay, all that, now back to the show.

A couple weeks back I checked out, from the mighty Multnomah County Library, the Artists and Graphic Designers Market 2014. This is part of my middle-term plan to restart my art career. Truly necessary, this book is, if there's a place worth selling to, it's in there and there are some articles about career strategy and tactics. Also … look! … a free one-year's ride on the publication's website! Such a deal!

This is the front of the book:

The premium is located on a card inside the front cover. So, remembering that this was designed by designers and laid out by layouters, let's turn to inside the front cover to find …

D'oh!

I'll be that was one awkward meeting, after these books came in.

No, I didn't take the free year. I'm snarky, but I'm not shady.

[art] Artists Trading Cards and Adventures In Precise Handrwiting

2452.

One thing I do better than anyone I know is handwrite.

This is not mere smug pride. I have had people come to me to handwrite notes and rewrite lists in the workplace so that they are more readable. I have hired myself out a couple of times to do calligraphy, which I take to with very little need for models.

It's something I just do. I've never understood why it comes so easily, but I don't stop to wonder. I enjoy the pure creative act of writing. Sometimes I simply write out the alphabet just to feel the pure joy of creating letters. Herewith some examples of what I sometimes just do for sheer joy. I'm no Lisa Ridgely, but I think I do quite well.

I have a package of Bristol-board Artist Trading Cards that I got as Muse a few weeks back. I figured a good way to prepare them would be to write my name and blog URL on the back, then draw or do whatevers on the front.

Most of the way through, though, I wondered how structured I could make it. The result was this:

The top's my normal handwriting. The bottom was my attempt to give it a "typewritery" feel but putting in serifs and making it all formal and very straight. It didn't come out exactly as I expected, but the space between where you aim and where you actually get is where creativity happens sometimes, and this was very visually pleasing to me.

I tried again, experimenting:

Even better! How about the two-storey type-style minuscule g's, huh? Nifty. That top line of glyphs is my name in Shavian, the dots preceding each word being the so-called "naming" dot. Since there are no such things as minuscules or majuscules in Shavian, a dot prefixed to each proper name or noun is used to indicate such.

Well, I thought, let's go for the gusto and just lay one out totally that way, and here's how I got:

This is approaching business-card territory, and how about that? It's keen. And I drew these lines of type without any guiding lines at all, using the the x-heights to visually extend imaginary guides, taking each glyph most carefully as I go.

This was all done with a fountain pen, because on Bristol fountain pens just leave this beautiful crisp line.

Now, I did have this stack of ATC's almost all labelled, but just was having so much fun creating these letters that I went back and am in the process of adding these carefully-drafted letters to the ones that already have a looser, sloppier handrwriting on. Like this:

The result is a stack of contact cards which are unified by look but within which each is a unique thing. I let the drafted letters be imperfectly balanced and wrote things off the beam to make it all look especially ... well, handcrafted ... each one as unique as snowflakes.

Looks like Ima need more Artists Trading Cards.

Feedback is welcome, ya know.

You can also post these about the intartubez. I won't complain too much.

Technorati Tags: artist trading cards, art, handwriting, calligraphy, design, type design, Samuel John Klein, ZehnKatzen

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[design] The Award for Awkward Layout Of The Year Goes To ... The Portland Tribune

2443.

... not for this front page of the 17 June edition, which is pretty much faultless. Heading up the flag page is another story on the Kyron Horman ongoing tragedy, examining an the issue from the effect it will have on Portland Public Schools policy:

Boy's case adds to PPS woes. The Kyron Horman case means something to just about every one of us, moreso to PPS who will have to deal with the aftermath in terms of security and policy.

I've always been a fan of PTrib layout. Like the approach in type, the colorful masthead; always though it was a winner.

But times are tough for print, and you've got to sell ad space any way you can, and one way to do it is to have a gate-flap, overlaying the front page on the right side - sort of the opposite of the spadea that The Big O had such a time with during the election season.

Layout, in my opinion, is about half art, half science. One has to look at where things are and where other things will wind up laying, because juxtaposition can cause amazingly awkward things. Let's fold over that ad flap on the right and find out just what can occur ...

Now, instead of adding to Portland Public School's woes, Boy's case adds to Boatloads of Fun.

Ahh ... huh.

Now, I'll add real quickly that they doubtlessly had no choice but to run the ad, and the buyer bought the front page for a reason. Layout problems may be easier solved by the armchair layout artist after the fact than in reality. I certainly don't think that PTrib was in any way shape or form trying to make any light of the issue or do anything more than just live up to the ad obligation.

Still, though, I wasn't at the layout of this issue, but I wish I was ... or at least been a fly on the wall when the layout artist was attacking this one. I did at one time apply to Community Newspapers for a layout job.

Never heard from them.

Pity, really.

Regardless of what anyone things of this or my opinion of it, you've got to admit, I think, that when you come up to a paper box like this:

... you're going to have an authentic Whiskey-tango-foxtrot moment.

And in complete fairness, knowing I tend to look more critically at layout than most everyone I know, I took it around to several friends and a few co-workers.

Each one of them saw what I saw. I didn't have to prompt them.

I wonder if I would have been able to make it come out any differently if I'd had a chance to do that layout. Would've loved the chance.

Technorati Tags: Portland Tribune, layout, awkward layout, Kyron Horman

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Tales Of Spell Check Terror: We Meant APOSTLES!

2019.Someone down at Brigham Young U's daily paper, The Daily Universe, made a very very amazingly amazing oopsie. I'll let this excerpt from the Salt Lake Tribune tell the tale:

The phone call Rich Evans got Monday morning wasn't good news.

It was an employee at Brigham Young University's The Daily Universe , where Evans is the editorial manager. There was a typo on the front page.

"It was the worst possible mistake," Evans recalled.

The error? A caption on a photo from this weekend's LDS General Conference stated that "Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning ...

The group is, of course, made of of Apostles. Apostates, on the other hand, are people whose presence in a church-policy-determining body would be awkward at best (maybe not if it were Unitarians).

We must have sympathy. We understand the caption editor was so aghast over what she'd accidentally done by choosing apostate in the spell-checker that she was in tears over it, and all involved seem to agree it was an honest mistake – an honest mistake that an entire print run had to be trashed over, but still.

On the up side, the journo student involved can take heart. She's just made the biggest mistake she'll make in her career and it's early on. It's going to be thumbs up the rest of the way, odds are.

And if anyone actually got a copy of the Universe (I love the sound of that sentence) that has the error, you can frame it or auction it off on eBay for a down payment on a house, your choice.

This is of course the biggest religious printing gaffe since the Adulterer's Bible, and the biggest printing gaffe since That Man Sarkozy.

When Etaoin Shrdlu pops up, boy, he means business!

Technorati Tags: The Daily Universe, Quorum of the Twelve Apostates, Famous Print Mistakes